EU Lot 5 FWC SIEA 2018 – Water Sector Policy Support Programme Second and Third Tranche Compliance Assessment
The EU has longstanding involvement in the water sector, through sector budget support operations (Water Sector Reform Programme (WRSP) I and II), sectoral reform programmes and technical assistance. The involvement of the EU in the water and water sanitation sector is likely to continue under the future programmes of the EU, currently being negotiated. Currently the EU's ongoing programme in the Water Sector is WSRP-II. Following the success of WSRP- Phase I , both Government of Egypt and the European Commission agreed to allocate an additional grant of € 120 million as phase two of Egypt's WSRP (i.e., so called WSRP-II) to take place between 2011-2015 to be disbursed on the basis of a new set of jointly agreed reform benchmarks. WSRP-II also has a Technical Assistance (TA) component of € 10 million to provide technical assistance to the beneficiary line ministries/institutions in order to carry out other associated reform measures. The beneficiary line ministries/institutions are Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation, Ministry of Water and Wastewater Utilities, Holding Company for Water and Wastewater and the Ministry of Finance. It is worth highlighting that all the Reform Benchmarks of the WSRP-II were carefully formulated by the Egyptian authorities with the support of the EU as facilitator only.
The overall objective of the WSRP-II was to support the GoE in continuing the reform programme of the water sector, in accordance with the objectives of the National Water Resource Plan 2005-2017 (NWRP 2005-2017), and of the adopted Water and Wastewater Sector Development Policy (WWSDP).
DESCRIPTION OF THE ASSIGNMENT
Global objective
The purpose of this assignment was to advise the EU Delegation and evaluate the possibility of releasing of the 2nd and 3rd tranches of the WSRP-II on the basis of complete assessment of the performance against the specific Reform Benchmarks (performance indicators and means of verification).
Specific objectives
The specific objectives of the assignment were (with regards to the release of the second and third tranches of the WSRP-II) (1) to assess the progress in terms of performance indicators of the reform on foster the general PFM reform, strengthen and enforce the water sector policy, improve the quality and strengthen the sustainability of the operations of the service providers, and improve the use of existing water resources (2) to evaluate the degree of completion of each Reform Benchmark (3) to collect and verify the appropriateness of all the means of verification specified in the Financing Agreement, (4) to advise the EU Delegation on the release of the tranche, (5) to guide the beneficiaries and the EU Delegation in structuring their compliance assessment reports.